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By rwhite, August 27, 2010 7:19 am

Conquistadors of the Useless

Sometimes, you have to try things you know you can’t do.

2010-08-26

by Richard White

I’m a rockclimber, which means that I spend at least part of my time attempting to climb mountains, cliff faces, or even just large boulders. The funny part is that, in many cases, there is an easier way to get to the top. You can walk up Mt. Whitney by a long and relatively gentle trail… or you can climb up one of the vertical routes that lead more or less directly to the top—the East Buttress, say.

For many climbers, rockclimbing gets boiled down to its essentials in “bouldering” which—outside, or inside at a rock gym—a short sequence of difficult moves is climbed. At the gym, bouldering problems are rated from V0 (relatively easy, as these things go) to upwards of V15, which are well-nigh impossible for mere mortals.

And here’s the funny thing: when one is bouldering, you don’t go around looking for problems you CAN do. Because… really, what’s the point of that? Where’s the challenge? The important thing is to find a problem that you can’t do—to be more specific, a problem that you just barely can’t do—so that you can work on it, discuss it with others, and tease out the problem’s secrets. Eventually, within a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days, one arrives at the solution to the problem, and is rewarded with a moment of well-earned satisfaction… and then it’s off to find a new problem. One that you can’t do.

It all seems a bit silly to describe it that way; it’s no wonder that French mountaineer Lionel Terray called his climbing autobiography “Conquistadors of the Useless.” But this idea of advancing one’s skills through attempting things that are just beyond our reach is fundamental to growth, and fundamental to the learning process. It’s certainly what we do for our students when we challenge them with something new, and then provide them with (or guide them in discovering) the tools and skills necessary to advance to the next level.

As teachers, we need to participate in that process ourselves. We need to challenge ourselves just as we challenge our students, and keep attempting things that are just beyond our reach.

Why should you do this? “Because it’s good for you.” Because we should model that process for our students. Because “life-long learning” isn’t just something from your school’s vision statement. Because we should be reminded of the occasional frustration that our students feel when things get especially challenging.

So here’s the question: “What are YOU going to do this new school year to challenge yourself?” What are you going to try that you’ve never tried before? What new unit, or major revision of an old unit, are you going to attempt, even where the risk of failure is perhaps high? What are you going to do that might not work? What are you going to try with your students, even knowing that something might go wrong?

Think about it! Pose yourself a problem in your hybrid classroom teaching that’s just out of your reach, and see what happens.

• Develop a unit that has your students contribute to an online discussion forum.
• Make a commitment to writing an email to parents once a quarter, letting them know how things are going in class.
• Have your students create curriculum-related videos and post them online.
• Create 5-minute video lessons and post them on YouTube.

Me? I’ve posed my own problems for myself.

And I’ll tell you all about it next week.

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By rwhite, May 30, 2010 12:08 pm

Open to Change

2010-05-30

by Richard White

It’s a fine line to walk, finding out what works for one’s self, but being open to change.

I found out the hard way a while ago, when, after 15 years of experience “mastering my craft” teaching in a number of different California schools, public and private, I had the good fortune to be able to invite a series of student teachers to share my classroom with me. On their worst days in my classroom, they left school defeated, nursing a sad feeling that they’d chosen to enter the wrong profession (been there, done that). On their best days, though, they blew me out of the water with their enthusiasm, their brilliant ideas, and outstanding teaching that left ME wondering if I it wasn’t time to turn in my lesson plans and go do something else. I learned very quickly that, when working with a student teacher, the best approach for me was to 1) listen to their ideas, 2) offer the wisdom of my own experience, and 3) shut up and get out of the way. Some days there would be post-lesson damage control to be done (for the students AND the student-teacher), but most days I’d walk away with a great new lesson/unit/teaching strategy that I could add to my bag of tricks.

Don’t get me wrong, though: working with a student teacher, when it’s done right, is a difficult and time-consuming process. The hardest part for me was always number 3 above, the shutting up. I mean, doesn’t this person know how much experience I have? Don’t they see how strong I am in the classroom? Don’t they realize how GOOD I am??! Of course, there are lots of different ways to be good, and what works for me isn’t going to work for someone else. There are lots of different strategies that can be employed in effective teaching, and I need to be open to the possibilities. I need to be open to the idea of changing some aspects of what I do, especially if there’s something better out there.

That’s the theory. The reality is that, especially as one spends a few years in the game, one gets invested in one’s system. To think about it from a media perspective, the carbon copies I used for my first lessons had to be typed into WordPerfect files, and then had to be retyped into ClarisWorks files, which fortunately were auto-translated into AppleWorks files, which required some finagling to be reformatted at Word .doc files, which are going to have to be completely redone (perhaps?) as LaTeX files… The time and energy that one spends in developing and presenting content has its own inertial legacy that becomes increasingly difficult to challenge.

At the level of the classroom itself: Do you make your notes available to students? Do you require students to take their own notes? Do you post your classroom content on the Internet? Do you allow students to take pictures of your notes? What about recording lectures?

We need to be open to the idea that students are developing new ways of acquiring and processing the information and procedures that we share with them. The “old way” of doing things isn’t necessarily the “best way,” although—and here’s the tricky part—it MIGHT be a really good way, and something that IS going to work for most of your students!

And there’s the rub. We have our years of experience that we are charged with using to help our students, but we have to be willing to accept that something new MIGHT be better, without yet knowing whether it really is or not.

My only advice here is to be willing to have the conversation. If students ask for your content to be made available online, consider doing that. If students want to take photos of classroom work, consider it. Why wouldn’t you want to allow that? Are you afraid that someone might actually get a copy of that information and… learn something??!

Oh, the horror! :)

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By rwhite, May 20, 2010 12:44 pm

Teachers: were curators, now filters

2010-05-20

by Richard White

I’ve had the good fortune in the last few weeks to run into a number of former students, including Megan, Danny, Eric, and David. These students, since I had the opportunity to teach them as long as ten years ago, have gone on to enjoy many successes in life, in lots of different ways. One was a reporter for the Washington Post, and embedded in Iraq for awhile. One worked at Apple before going on to work at a start-up. One is a few weeks away from finishing a doctorate in Electrical Engineering, and one is doing Ph.D. work on lasers at Caltech.

During a recent visit from Danny, we had a great chance to talk about the changing nature of the profession of teaching. It used to be that the teacher was a curator of sorts. One of the primary jobs of the teacher was to assemble information from a number of sources—textbooks, personal experience, encyclopedias, professionals; sources that the student might not ordinarily have access to—and present that information to the student, for consumption or manipulation. It was a good life, but a bit labor intensive, in many ways. Being a “teacher as curator” required a lot of management and coordination of resources.

Those days, for many teachers, are long gone. All that information from all those sources is, to a great extent, now available via an enormous firehose. Maybe you’ve heard of my friend Mr. Internet? Online textbooks, professional blogs, Wikipedia, corporate websites, educational websites, all contain enormous amounts of information, and provide the opportunity to learn from and converse with people in just about every field. Any teacher, with 15-minutes of googling and fact-checking, can assemble hundreds of links to quality information that can be used by students to guide their learning.

One of the new jobs for the teacher, then, is to manage that firehouse for our students. One of our new jobs is to reduce the number of hits from any given Google search from “thousands”—an overwhelming number that really doesn’t help anyone—down to a dozen or so.

I’ve got to admit, I used to scoff at the idea of a programmed WebQuest, dismissing it as just a way for teachers to repackage some of their old content in a new medium. I’m starting to realize, though, that telling my programming students only that “you need to use Google to find resources that will help you program a game in Python” is a bit vague; it leaves too much to chance and will almost certainly result in a certain amount of time wasted.

Part of my job, then, is assemble resources for them, not by collecting materials they wouldn’t otherwise have, but by pre-sorting the materials that they already have (via the Internet). A smaller subset of websites, etc., delivered in class or made available on the course website, helps to narrow down the places they need to dig through, and allows for a more efficient use of class/study time.